Royce Hutain knew it was going to be cold and probably pretty smelly.
But when you have neon blue water that rarely shows up off local waters — you can’t help but jump in with an epic cannonball and splash around in the bright blue saltwater.
“I will tell you it got in my mouth and it tastes horrible,” said Hutain, a photographer documenting the recent bioluminescent water who ditched his camera and shirt to jump off a boat into the glowing Newport Harbor late Friday night, with friend Patrick Coyne capturing the moment on film. “But it was so worth it.”
Hutain and two other photographers, Mark Girardeau and Coyne, first documented the rare phenomenon late Wednesday evening off Newport Beach’s shoreline. Hutain, a drone photographer, had noticed a thick red tide earlier in the day and on a hunch, the trio set out with hopes the bioluminescence would show up.
They were in luck. Red tide doesn’t always mean the ocean will glow at night, but it can. Bioluminescent dinoflagellates will swim up toward the surface during the day and get pushed together, then when moved by water or waves, they make the water look bright blue. Red tides are unpredictable and not all of them produce bioluminescence.
Footage they took the first night in Newport Beach, which is still open to the public during the coronavirus pandemic, went viral and has been shown on news outlets throughout Southern California. The glowing blue waves were reported in Newport Beach again Thursday night, with more spectators on the sand watching as word spread that the bioluminescence was off the coast.
Photos have also been popping up of the blue neon waves showing up in San Diego, but with beaches closed further south, the light show is hard to see. When it showed up in 2018 at those beaches, crowds showed up at dark beaches from La Jolla to Oceanside to watch the mesmerizing sight.
The algae creating the biolum typically aren’t toxic, but often smelled bad.
“My fiance told me I smelled terrible when I got home, Hutain admitted.
Without movement, the harbor water appeared dark. But when they put their hands in the water and splashed around, the water would glow.
“Unless you went in the water, you’d have no idea,” he said.
The photographers on a friend’s boat ventured out of the Newport Harbor a bit and got to witness miles of bright fish swimming through the dark sea and even saw some dolphins, visible only when the bioluminescence illuminated the dolphins’ bodies swimming in the pitch-black ocean.
“It’s hard to find dolphins at night. You would see them glowing in the distance. After your eyes adjusted, you can see anything in the water from pretty far. It’s absolutely insane,” he said.
They even did a few donuts spins in the boat, capturing the water as it lit up in a circle.
While most people would add swimming in glowing water just once in their life on their bucket list, it’s the second time Hutain has been able to do so, surfing in it back in 1998 in Huntington Beach.
“It was an amazing memory,” he said in an interview earlier this week. “You could only see the waves when it was glowing and starting to crumble, that’s how you knew it was coming. Friends going underwater shaking around, you see this weird human-like blob of glowing stuff.”
He said it’s been at least five years since he’s seen it happen off Orange County waters, and a welcome moment in nature with everything happening in the world.
Hutain made a science experiment out of it, putting some in a bottle and bringing it home. He went into a dark bathroom and watched as the water lit up and sparkled.
“It was something out of a Disney movie,” he said. “It was sparking when you moved it around.”
Last night made three consecutive evenings the bioluminescence has shown up in areas of Newport Beach. It’s unknown how long it will stick around, sometimes staying just a day, other times weeks. It also showed up offshore in Dana Point this week.
It’s unknown if the beaches closer to his home in South Bay, Long Beach or Laguna Beach were glowing, with those stretches closed by authorities to discourage gathering during the coronavirus outbreak.
